On the third floor of the ICA Miami, a new desert landscape video by French artist Marguerite Humeau is backdropped by an expansive vista of tree-top greenery. The staging of Humeau’s anthropocene-focused exhibition of video and sculpture—which opened Tuesday alongside painting shows by Lucy Bull and Ding Shilun—takes great advantage of the expansive windows in the Aranguren + Gallegos-designed museum, as well as the Design District’s lush surroundings. “When people think of Miami, it’s often palm trees and the water, but this tree canopy is a classic Miami backdrop,” says ICA Miami director Alex Gartenfeld.

Marguerite Humeau, “\*sk\*/ey- “, works in progress in artist’s studio, Marguerite
Humeau, 2024. Photo: Eoin
Greally. Courtesy of the artist.

Gartenfeld has been at the helm of the contemporary art institute since its founding a decade ago. He’s only 37. Now he’s guiding the ICA’s important next phase, a major expansion. In October it was announced that the museum would take over the 30,765-square-foot building next door, formerly home to the de la Cruz Collection, effectively doubling the exhibition space of the ICA.

Exterior of the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Miami. Photo: Iwan Baan.

“It’s my third rodeo,” says Gartenfeld, who also overseen the move to their temporary space in North Miami in 2014 and the design of the permanent residence in Miami’s Design District, which opened in 2017. The expansion’s main goals are to showcase more of the permanent collection and to further support performance and film programming. “We’re just excited to amplify,” he added. “No anxieties.”

There’s also no architect attached to the project yet. Gartenfeld maintains he’s as eager as everyone else to learn who it will be: “I assure you, no secrets.”

Installation view, “Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Palace.” Photo: Zachary Balber, courtesy of ICA Miami.

Tuesday’s opening saw the museum packed with locals and out of towners alike, one of the major kick-off events of the city’s infamous fair-driven art week. The new shows by Humeau, Bull, and Shilun complemented two other exhibitions which had opened a couple weeks prior, both revisiting bold colorful graphics of the postwar period. On the first floor, there is a small survey of geometric paintings and sculptures from the 1960s by the Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim, who passed away in 1991. Arguably the main attraction, however, is a comprehensive retrospective of Tokyo-born Keiichi Tanaami’s work, titled Memory Collage, a first U.S. solo museum exhibition by the artist who passed away earlier this year.

Keiichi Tanaami, Elephant and Whale in Cherry Blossom
Falling Day, (2012). ©Keiichi Tanaami. Courtesy of NANZUKA.

“We were surprised, perhaps naively,” said Gartenfeld who’d begun working on the show with Tanaami before his passing. “I thought he was in perfect health.” Curated by Gartenfeld and Gean Moreno, the ICA Miami’s Director of the Art + Research Center, the Tanaami show spans the kaleidoscopic Pop master’s paintings, sculptures, collages, and avant-garde films with works from 1965 to 2024. “It’s a really cool responsibility to show Tanaami’s work at this moment,” Gartenfeld added.

Lucy Bull, Most Attractive (2019). Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky.

There are threads of fantastical psychedelia between Tanaami’s pop culture-infused oeuvre, Humeau’s alien yet earthy sculpture, and Bull’s hyper-swirl colorful abstract painting, all on view until the end of March. “I was thrilled when I found out Marguerite was also having a show,” said Los Angeles-based Bull, whose U.S. museum debut “The Garden of Forking Paths” includes a 30-foot-long vertical painting in the museum’s stairwell. She was equally excited by Tanaami’s work, which she discovered through their concurrent programming, gushing: “They’re so dense, those collages!”

Installation view: “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Oct 28, 2021–
Apr 17, 2022. Photo: Zachary Balber

During its ten-year span, the ICA Miami has established itself as a place of discovery and also recovery, balancing both taste-making sensibilities and a keen attention to significant yet under-recognized artist legacies. At the opening Tuesday, Miami artist and nonprofit director Naomi Fisher emphasized the rigor that drives the ICA Miami team’s curatorial practice. “Judy Chicago and Bettye Saar were iconic thorough shows about feminist heroes who are finally getting their due,” she said recalling the ICA Miami’s Chicago retrospective which opened in 2018 and Saar’s rarely-exhibited site-specific installations from the 1980s and 90s which opened in 2021. “I like that their program is so global and smart and researched, with still so much beauty. And grounded locally,” added Fisher, whose own work is represented in the ICA Miami’s permanent collection.

Alex Gartenfeld, ICA artistic director and artist Judy Chicago attend Soho House Hosts In Conversation, 2018 at Soho House Miami. Photo: Andrew Toth/Getty Images for Soho House.

Gartenfeld explains the core curatorial team has been together a long time, with Moreno and assistant curator Amanda Morgan both having strong ties to the local community. Moreno, an important voice in art theory globally, originally hails from Colombia but has lived in Miami for decades while Morgan is Miami born and raised. The core team also includes Stephanie Seidl, the Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, who came to Miami from Dusseldorf for the job nine years ago. “Each of us brings different particular modes of research,” explained Gartenfeld. Today, the ICA Miami acquired a work by Kim Farkas from Tara Downs gallery at NADA as well as Jin Han Lee work from the artist’s solo booth with Union Pacific at Art Basel fair.

Installation view “Ding Shilun.” Photo: Zachary Balber, courtesy of ICA Miami.

In addition to the exhibitions by Humeau, Bull, Shilun, Valentim, and Tanaami, on Tuesday, visitors were also greeted by a new interactive public installation, a technicolor dollhouse by Laurie Simmons and Peter Wheelhouse. The structure was situated next to a band of mannequins by John Miller. The respective feminist camp and prominence of wigs was both reminiscent of another standout show at the recent ICA Miami from recent memory: “Alex Bag: The Van (Redux)*” which opened in 2015. In addition to being well-researched and rigorous, the ICA Miami’s program and collection is not allergic to weirdness or humor.

We don’t know exactly when expansion will be concluded and the new additional space will be open to the public. Not before the end of 2025 Gartenfield explains. But what we can look forward to is more ICA Miami—including more room for new media, live arts, educational initiatives, and greater opportunity to showcase what the museum has collected that’s often not on display for the public right now. “It’s an incredible story that’s being told through the collection,” said Gartenfeld.